example fulbright personal statement

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Fulbright Program

Global u | graduate school, main navigation, tips for writing a personal statement, length: one single-spaced page
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The Fulbright website provides the following description of the personal statement:

“This statement should be a narrative giving a picture of yourself as an individual. It should deal with your personal history, family background, influences on your intellectual development, the educational and cultural opportunities (or lack of them) to which you have been exposed, and the ways in which these experiences have affected you. Also include your special interests and abilities, career paths, and life goals, etc. It should not be a recording of facts already listed on the application or an elaboration of your statement of proposed study.”

The Fulbright personal statement is an opportunity for you to share with the committee information about yourself that is not available in other parts of the application. In it you can provide the committee with a sense of your personality and your interests. Ideally, your personal statement will complement your written proposal in some way. For example, if you are proposing a research project, you might discuss the origin and development of your interest in that field of research.

There is no one format or approach that will work well for every application. Some applicants choose to write an intellectual autobiography highlighting the key moments in their academic development. Others discuss their passion for travel, the topic of their proposal, or the host country, detailing the origins of their interest and how it evolved. Many students give an overview of significant experiences and reflections, while others tell one particular story as an example of a larger point about who they are.

Keep in mind that engagement with the community in the host county is an important criterion in selection as the primary purpose of the Fulbright Program is to encourage mutual understanding between people from the U.S. and people from other countries. Your application should indicate how you expect to become involved in the local community, whether through volunteer work, extra-curricular activities, and/or simply pursuing a hobby—sports, music, cooking, etc.—in the host country. The personal statement is the best place to include this information.

Prewriting:

Writing a personal statement is an exercise in self-reflection. To write a good statement, you will first need to think about your accomplishments and past experiences. These can be personal, academic, or extracurricular, including any significant insights or experiences that relate to your interest in international exchange, the host country in which you hope to do your work, or the specific project or area of study you plan to pursue. Your goal in this personal statement is to give the committee a sense of who you are and how you became interested in applying for this particular project in the context of an international exchange.

A free writing process will help you sort through your experiences and narrow your focus to two or three central issues or experiences you can use to frame and anchor your essay. Consider the following questions:

• What problems or questions intrigue you? How did you become
• What sorts of things have you done outside of the classroom? What have you learned from your extracurricular or work experiences, and how have those experiences contributed to your growth?
• Have you had to overcome any unusual obstacles or hardships (for example, economic, familial, or physical) in your life? If so, what were these obstacles and how did you face them?
• What might be unique, special, or distinctive about your life story or past experiences?

You are encouraged to work with a writing proctor even at this early stage. Talking over your experiences and reviewing your initial thoughts with someone else can help you narrow your focus and determine what you really want to discuss in your personal statement.

Your personal statement should not be a narrative version of your resume, listing events, activities, and accomplishments one after the other. Rather, it should provide the committee with a snapshot of yourself that connects to why you want to pursue this particular Fulbright in the country you have chosen. Doing this in one page is no small feat. The best statements undergo multiple drafts and revisions over a period of time. Give yourself plenty of time to write your statement, and allow it to evolve along with your understanding of why you want to pursue the project you are proposing.

In general, your personal statement will contain the following three sections:

• The opening paragraph  will contain a statement, example, or anecdote that grabs the readers’ attention right away, while providing a solid frame for your essay as a whole. This is the most important part of your statement, and it will likely be one of the hardest parts for you to write. When drafting, don’t get stuck on the opening paragraph. You will revise it many times as you revise the essay as a whole.
• The body  presents more specific detail, building on the framework you have established. The rule of thumb here is to use concrete examples to illustrate your points. Show, don’t tell. Rather than simply telling the committee “I am curious,” “I love science,” “I am patient and dependable,” etc., consider using one or two anecdotes that can help you focus and bring specificity to the discussion.
• The concluding paragraph  can address your future goals and how your work/experiences as a Fulbright scholar fit into your future plans. Your personal statement should not repeat information already represented in your proposal; thus, you should not conclude your personal statement by making an argument for why you need a Fulbright to conduct your study. Instead, you should discuss more generally how your proposed Fulbright year relates to your future goals and aspirations. The scholarship committees want to award Fulbright awards to people who will use their Fulbright experiences as bridges from where they are now to where they are going. 
Students have a tendency to be too general and rely on abstractions or clichéd phrases when describing their experiences and interests. Show your passion for neuroscience through the experiences you’ve had and the skills you’ve developed, show them you believe in the value of being open-minded through a specific example, show them that you care about issues facing developing nations by talking about your experiences helping to develop new irrigation techniques in El Salvador one summer, etc. The more specific and concrete you can be about illustrating your interests, the better.

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October 6, 2022

Writing a Confident and Thematically Driven Personal Statement for Fulbright

Like many large grant organizations, the Fulbright Foundation requires applicants to write both a statement of purpose and a personal statement.

Regardless of your personal background, a strong personal statement for a large grant application like the Fulbright should always have a clear focus: the content of it should always serve the overarching project proposal that you’ve articulated in your statement of purpose.

[For more about the statement of purpose, check out: Writing the Fulbright Statement of Purpose as a Practical Document . ]

4 goals of your grant personal statement

The personal statement is a persuasive text in which your job is to convince the reader that you are excited about and capable of achieving the impactful goals you have set for yourself. The choices that you make as you share your personal history should enable you to accomplish the following goals:

• Explain what drives you to carry out this particular project with an authentic sense of enthusiasm, passion, and commitment towards generating tangible impacts.
• Describe past experiences that have equipped you to carry out this particular project with a clear sense of cultural sensitivity, collaboration, and purpose.
• If your project plays a part in your overarching personal or professional trajectory, show the reader what you have already done to fulfill this mission.
• Show the committee what kinds of impacts you plan to have both as you carry out this project, and afterwards. How will the time that you spend on this grant contribute to a future that goes far beyond the project itself?

Below I’ve included the personal statement that I wrote for a successful application to the Fulbright Brazil cohort of 2016. After the original essay, I have provided analysis that clearly shows the argumentative logic and supporting evidence in each paragraph.

Fulbright personal statement example

My fulbright personal statement.

(Original text)

I first studied Portuguese to expand my comparative engagement with Spanish Latin American literature as an undergraduate student. This literary curiosity, however, quickly unfolded into an overwhelming year of music, buses, warm tropical air, and full- time coursework as an exchange student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 2007. Captivating Brazilian authors like Darcy Ribeiro and Machado de Assis pulled me deeper into the Portuguese language. The political power of Música Popular Brasileira and the stark creativity of Cinema Novo forced me to reconsider my own historical perspectives regarding the increasingly visible and global role of regional cultures. After that year of international studies my relationship with Brazil continued to expand in dynamic ways.

My first professional role at Glass Lewis required me to conduct research in Spanish and Portuguese, translating documents for the explicit purpose of assessing the monetary value of publicly traded companies in the Americas. There I realized that my affinity for language acquisition and critical thinking put me in a unique position to facilitate access to economic and cultural dialogues regarding the growing importance of Latin America and Brazil. After this experience I attended the University of Cambridge and wrote my thesis on 20th century visual and photographic representations of the U.S.-Mexico border. This project showed me that there are undeniable links between aesthetic representation, technology, politics and economic flows. By continuing my studies at the doctoral level and seeking opportunities to work with Latin America and Brazil, I make choices that allow me to facilitate public access to information, critical dialogue and multiple points of view in a variety of international contexts.

In the classroom I have collaborated with Professor L. to teach students how to translate ethnographic narratives about musical experiences into research projects regarding relationships between global popular culture, technology and individual identities. I have spoken at several conferences about my collaboration with UCLA archivists to make a previously hidden collection of cordel accessible through a highly searchable and detailed Finding Aid at the Online Archives of California. Last year I consulted with a small educational start-up called Endless Mobile, a company that facilitates access to educational information for communities that only have intermittent access to the Internet. At Endless Mobile I served as a content strategist and developed tools for selecting and storing educational content that is now being used in classrooms all over Guatemala.

The knowledge that I continue to develop and gain as I study Latin America and Brazil is only useful unless* I can share it with others. There are a variety of venues through which information can be made accessible to larger audiences, and they are not always in the classroom. In addition to my studies, experiences at Glass Lewis, the UCLA Library’s Special Collections and internet companies like Endless Mobile have shown me that that the stories we tell about relationships between the Americas, whether they are driven by financial or educational needs, play incredibly powerful roles in the contemporary world. As a student, translator, teacher and researcher I aim to participate in these conversations and search for better ways to make them possible.

* This typo was in my original (and successful) proposal. “Unless” should be ‘if.”

Analysis of the argument – paragraph by paragraph

Paragraph 1.

Persuasive goal: Explain my initial exposure to studying in the host country of Brazil as the root of my current desire to study the “increasingly visible and global role of regional cultures.”

Evidence provided in paragraph: As I discuss my experiences studying abroad in Brazil, I clearly reference the main components of my project. The prominent content of my project: “literatura de cordel,” is an object of regional culture, and the complex mechanism I wish to consider: “global visibility,” results from processes of circulation and redistribution.

Paragraph 2

Persuasive goal: Clearly show how my postgraduate experiences were a continuation of the interests I developed during my year abroad in Brazil.

Evidence provided in paragraph: Whether in my professional role as a financial researcher, master’s student at Cambridge, or doctoral student at UCLA, I consistently chose to pursue complex questions related to “public access to information” in cross-cultural, multi-lingual, and global contexts. Again, in this paragraph I’ve chosen to narrate my professional history through the broadest theme of the project: redistribution.

Paragraph 3

Persuasive goal: Demonstrate the active role that I currently play in the process of redistributing educational information through teaching, archival collaboration, and non-research work experiences.

This paragraph ties together a diverse set of work experiences, and purposefully cuts through a number of institutional boundaries. By clearly narrating my recent non-research work experiences as a teacher, collaborative archivist, and content developer for an education start-up, I clearly state my capacity to carry out my mission both within and beyond the university setting.

Paragraph 4

Hey there’s a typo in this paragraph, and I still made it through!

Persuasive goal: Envision a future for myself that will allow me to have broad social impacts through a continuous practice of making information accessible in a variety of institutional settings.

Evidence provided in paragraph: This paragraph clearly expresses a personal mission that is open to the future, wishes to make information available outside of the classroom, and can see beyond this singular project. I acknowledge the powerful nature of cultural relationships between the Americas and, in the final sentence; I firmly plant myself in the contemporary world, even though my object of study is from the past.

Bottom line: what I learned

Hindsight is 20/20. Even though I didn’t know how the events, activities, and interests of my past experiences would add up while they were happening, the personal statement was a chance for me to confidently show the committee that I was passionate about and prepared to achieve the project-based goals that I set for myself.

Need help navigating the grant application writing process? Looking for personalized guidance for your personal statement? Learn how your Accepted advisor can help you achieve your educational and professional goals.

Fulbright 2023-2024 Competition Deadline

Source: Fulbright website

Student Affairs Advisor and scholarship expert, Rebecca has six years experience reviewing and editing large grant applications, research-based proposals, statements of purpose, personal statements and fellowship materials. Want Rebecca to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!

Related Resources:

• 5 Fatal Flaws to Avoid in Your Grad School Statement of Purpose , a free guide • What I Learned about Grant Writing from Putting Together 3 Fulbright Applications Before Finally Being Selected • Writing the Fulbright Statement of Grant Purpose as a Practical Document

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• Tips for Writing a Fulbright Personal Statement / from the Fulbright Program, University of Utah
• Tips for Writing a Fulbright Research Grant Proposal / from the Fulbright Program, University of Utah
• Sample Successful Fulbright Essays: For Teaching Assistantship Proposals, for Research Proposals, and for Study & Research Proposals / from the Student Fellowship Office, University of Rochester
• Writing Fulbright Essays: The Personal Statement & the Statement of Grant Purpose / from Yale University
• Writing for the Fulbright Scholarship [with samples essays] / from Penn State University
• Fulbright Personal Statements: Tips & Guidelines / from the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan
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